Profiles

In a new series, fSpace is profiling members of our coworking space. We begin with Julia Jones, Founder & Director of Newborn Mothers.

Written by Belinda Teh

Julia is an author and entrepreneur who runs her business Newborn Mothers from fSpace two days a week. She started her journey as a postpartum doula, a non-medical professional who provides emotional and physical support during a woman’s transition into motherhood.

If you’re sitting there thinking: I’ve never even heard of a doula before – you’re not alone. And this, Julia says, is exactly what needs to change.

In most western societies, the needs of mothers after childbirth are often overlooked as the needs of newborn babies take centre stage. However, this is not the case in all countries.

In China, the custom of ‘confinement’ is widely practiced where the mother remains indoors to rest, breastfeed and bond with her baby for 30 days after giving birth. A ‘confinement lady’ cooks, cleans and does the dreaded nights of broken sleep each time the baby cries.

Similar post-delivery practices exist in countries all over the world including India, Japan, Mexico, Korea and many in the Caribbean.

In Malaysia, there are postpartum professionals who specialise in massaging mums who have just given birth. “These countries see the postpartum period as an enrichment process,” says Julia.

“Mothers are pampered and celebrated, she’s expected to ask for as much help as she needs and most importantly, she’s allowed to make mistakes. It’s a period of loving and learning.”

Unfortunately, these practices are a far cry from what many new mothers in developed western countries currently experience. Far too many feel confused, guilty and inadequate as they struggle through the first few sleepless and tearful months.

“There’s no village,” says Julia. “After giving birth, mothers generally receive little guidance and training from the mainstream healthcare system beyond practical baby care and breastfeeding. As our society is built on nuclear family households, the isolation of mothers is systemic. They feel that they should be able to do everything themselves. They live with a lot of guilt for not meeting their breastfeeding or sleeping goals, and we glorify this idea of being a super-mum.”

For Julia, it is concerning that so many new mothers are expected to adopt a ‘business as usual’ attitude. And what she finds the most concerning of all is that the leading cause of all maternal deaths within 12 months of giving birth is suicide.

Despite this challenging landscape, Julia envisioned a society with a completely different approach to new mums. She realised that in order to get there, she would have to do more than just working as a doula with mothers on a one-on-one basis. Real change could only come from educating the greater community on the value of supporting newborn mothers and sharing that knowledge with as many postpartum professionals as possible.

For Julia, that meant pulling together her a radically new paradigm of her own and training midwives and doulas who could then go out and be advocates for change.

“At the beginning of my career, I completed five different doula trainings, but I knew it just wasn’t the answer I was looking for,” says Julia. “None of them really addressed how to support new mothers through this major life transition, this rite of passage. So I drew on my knowledge of brain science, anthropology and Ayurvedic medicine that I’d gained on my own journey of motherhood, and it turns out it’s what many professionals in the postpartum industry have been searching for too.

I’ve had emails from experts in the field who have been working for 20 years tell me they’ve never seen anything like this before, and they’re 100% behind me.”

Julia now has over 200 students in dozens of countries around the world who take her courses online. Apart from her professional development course that is accredited by the Australian College of Midwives, Julia has also written a cookbook, created a postpartum course for pregnant mothers and will soon be launching a book due in January.

She’s currently running her most ambitious crowdfunding campaign to fund the launch and has plenty more projects planned for 2018.

So how does Julia maintain a balance and sense of calm while running her business, juggling three kids and still having a life of her own?

Julia practices what she preaches and has built her own village: she has a babysitter, a cleaner, her mum helps, her husband does school drop offs.

She pays for and asks for (and accepts) a lot of help. She also has two assistants that help her run the business. “Forget being a super-mum!” Julia says. “Identify what drains you and delegate.”

Coming to fSpace is another essential part of running her business. Julia realised early on that she needed to find a dedicated workspace when her third child was banging on her office door while she was trying to get her work done.

She sat down with her husband to discuss the idea of committing to a coworking space, and they worked out that having Julia out of the house and leaning into her business two days a week would ultimately benefit the whole family.

When asked what the best thing about coming to fSpace is, Julia laughs: “It’s quiet! And I can drink my coffee while it’s hot! I’m very blessed, I’ve got three kids and the house is constantly full of people, but fSpace is quiet and calm and grown up. It’s opposite to home.”

But despite all that she’s achieved in the last 10 years, Julia says there’s still so much work to be done. “Doulas are currently all employed out of small private businesses. But ideally, doulas should be publicly funded. Recently, the child health nurse has been pushed out of public funding. In light of such terrible statistics about maternal suicide, depression and anxiety, we can’t be pulling back!”

At the same time, Julia points out that having more women in positions of power are an essential part of the puzzle. “In New Zealand for example, there is a much higher representation of women which means that women’s issues are given attention and women’s perspectives are considered. Australia’s got some work to do!”

On a more personal level, Julia says that the mindsets of mothers everywhere also needs to change. “Mums these days don’t think they deserve to be happy or feel that they can claim they’re a good mum. It’s ok to ask for help and it’s ok to talk about it when you’re struggling. Most importantly, don’t disappear into your role as a mother. It’s important to have your own dreams outside of your baby.”

Leveraging a passion for heritage and architecture, Miles looks at the commercial side of design and uses his artistic side to explore ideas.

A love of variety, change and new challenges precipitated yearlong travel through Europe and South America. That travel, along with 18 months of living in Montreal – quietly one of the coolest cities in the world – inspired Miles and his work. It also gave him international perspective and European influence on his designs.

His love of science has also impacted his work. One such example was the Science Fiction/Science Future project for BHP Billiton where he developed an exhibition and then photographed it as part of the development of marketing collateral.

Science was behind another exhibition with his collection ‘SCI-POP Portraits’, which was commissioned for National Science Week 2013. The exhibition showcased silkscreen portraits, stop-motion and time-lapse info videos of Western Australian scientists who made significant contributions to science from 220 years ago to present day.

Miles has exhibited his work on several continents. While in Montreal, he exhibited an art project based on Expo 67, the remarkable category one world fair held in Montreal in 1967.

Curve Tomorrow is a fascinating international business that exists to improve the lives of people by solving challenging problems. Their humble goal is “to positively impact the lives of 1 billion people”.

Mohinder Jaimangal, a founder and director of Curve Tomorrow, readily admits that their goal of 1 billion is incredibly ambitious, but also notes that with the nearby populations of India and Asia, it’s not as farfetched as it might first seem.

Curve Tomorrow was founded in 2009 by a group of university friends in Melbourne, Australia. To understand the business, it’s important to understand a little about these friends and how they came to work together.

After perhaps wisely moving on from dreams of a career as a professional basketball player, Mo studied mechatronics – technology combining software, electronics and mechanical engineering – at The University of Melbourne.

After graduating, he joined Object Consulting, a consultancy that specialized in software development. While expecting to work on robotics, he spent most of his time creating apps for banking and telecommunication clients.

This consultancy led to an interesting role in a decidedly larger company, Holden. Working with a good friend and future cofounder of Curve Tomorrow, Mo helped lead an innovation and development team for Holden and General Motors worldwide.

Working out of Melbourne and GM headquarters in Detroit with eye-popping budgets, Mo worked on concept cars by developing 10-year innovation plans with trend analysis and user interface designs for vehicles of the future.

After Holden, Mo joined Dius, a startup technology company that specialized in pure agile software development. Coming in when there were nine people in the company, Dius has since grown to over 125 employees. It was here Mo experienced the roller coaster ride of how a start-up transitions into a small-medium enterprise.

Throughout all these roles, Mo came to realize the importance of two factors that would influence the direction of his career. One – doing work that contributed a positive social impact, and two – appreciating the value and enjoyment of working with good friends.

Both these elements were present when Mo helped start Bliss, a luxury chocolate label and retail chain in India. In addition to marketing a luxury product, Bliss had significant social reinvestment and worked towards breaking barriers and creating opportunities for the disadvantaged.

This of course led the same university friends combining to create Curve Tomorrow. Now, less than 10 years later, they’ve expanded to have offices in Australia, USA, India, Sri Lanka and France.

Their main focus is currently on healthcare, however they have plans to venture into education and environmental areas as well.

Incorporating best practices from previous businesses, the directors of Curve Tomorrow have implemented three key strategic principles: lean startup, design thinking and agile development. This approach has led to multiple awards, which has raised their profile and opened doors to funding opportunities.

Curve Tomorrow is interesting in that they do not focus on job titles. While each director has a role that relates to responsibilities normally associated with a CEO or CFO, they are in such constant communication that there is substantial overlap. They also promote an open, equal culture where everyone is valued, which is why ‘junior’ or ‘senior’ titles are not used in their company.

Projects range from process automation improvement in hospitals to automating existing research processes. Research into these areas has afforded them full access to all aspects of health care delivery, including even into operating theatres during surgical procedures.

Curve Tomorrow has worked with world-class health organizations around the world to improve efficiencies, solve clinical problems and commercialize intellectual property.

One example is the development of HeadCheckTM, an app that helps parents and coaches recognize the signs and symptoms of concussion in children. Designed by leading child concussion experts in Australia, this app is endorsed by the AFL and is available for free download.

An example of improving efficiencies is their development of a Q-MaxTM, a desktop app that enables a team at the Victorian Clinical Genetics Services to perform research and screening for epigenetic mutations (a genetic condition) more accurately and efficiently.

Q-MaxTM took a practice that routinely took four days to process thousands of samples over multi-step spreadsheet analysis and reduced it to a seamless ten-second task. This new process also eliminated data entry error, which results in better outcomes from the research.

Curve Tomorrow also co-developed PeersTM, an iPad app that is the first digital and objective assessment tool to enable early detection of social disorders in children. Traditional detection processes typically include observing children, documenting findings on a written report, and then inputting the information into a program for analysis. PeersTM is an age appropriate game that children play while being automatically assessed for primary characteristics of autism spectrum disorders. This lets health professionals detect social behaviour problems more quickly and easily, leading to critical early intervention treatments.

It’s work like this that makes it easy to hope Curve Tomorrow reaches their lofty goals as soon as possible.

Like many of the best creatives, Ric Cairns’ journey to become a creative director took some unexpected and unorthodox turns.

As a teenager, Ric saw a career as a writer – his true passion – as pie in the sky, so he studied civil engineering at UWA (he followed a high school friend there!). He completed his four-year degree, but his heart wasn’t in engineering, so he took his first sharp turn: via the university radio station into broadcasting.

Radio allowed Ric to combine his love of music with his love of language – he crafted written talk-breaks to make his on-air work as interesting as possible. The approach apparently worked well as he progressed to a regular afternoon session on 96FM (where they obviously rewarded hair growth).

All that creative writing on the run must have whet his appetite, because he started trying his hand at advertising in his spare time. It got serious when he did the industry course for creatives – AWARD School – and took off the WA prize.

This brought a call from the precurser of The Brand Agency, inviting him to give up his radio gig to write for them. In some really awkward timing, the same day he got that offer, the radio ratings were announced, giving his show the biggest audience in Perth. (In true ‘80s style this was referred to as being the ‘King of Radio’…)

Understandably, Ric hung around to enjoy his regal position for a while, but he came to realise there were only so many ways to make the weather sound interesting. So, just the following year, his career went around another hairpin: he left radio to fully immerse himself in advertising as a writer.

In a very memorable first year, Ric won a prize at a Campaign Brief workshop that sent him to Sydney to work and learn at legendary Australian ad agency The Campaign Palace. And in that fateful week, he wrote a risque TV ad for Cleo Magazine’s 50 Most Eligible Bachelors that went on to win Gold at the London International Awards – and be one of the most complained-about commercials in Australian history.

This put Ric quickly on the advertising radar – and on the cover of Campaign Brief magazine…

Three years into his advertising career, Ric became creative director of The Shorter Group, a new agency introducing integrated multidisciplinary creative services. As department head, Ric built a strong team of writers, art directors, graphic designers and 3D designers who all worked together to bring brand strategies to life. It must have been a great pitch, because new business doubled the size of the agency in nine months.

From 2000, Ric also served as president of the Perth Advertising and Design Club, helping promote creativity in advertising and design. He led the creation of two of the club’s most fondly remembered annual award shows.

When the economic party ended, The Shorter Group merged with Perth’s biggest agency Marketforce, where Ric remained creative head on the Shorter’s accounts. He worked on many major projects over almost a decade, including creating a five-year global campaign for Tourism WA.

All those years working with designers eventually saw Ric spending more time on design himself. With a particular passion for identity, he finally stepped out of Marketforce in 2011 to try to broaden the nature of his work. This most recent twist in his story was the beginning of Brandino, his own consultancy that allows him to work directly with clients across all aspects of their brand communications: strategy, identity, design, writing, and increasingly film-making.

Ric is focused on ideas, a passion he has shared through guest lectures at various universities. His design philosophy is about “adding meaning and memorability to what we do”. He looks for visual ideas with potential for diverse applications, to create interesting and engaging brands – his work for Interchange WA is a notable example.

Brandino has consulted across all mediums in most areas of industry. From designing exhibitions, to creating unique business cards or compelling annual reports, to building entirely new brand identities, Ric has done just about everything. His new portfolio site at www.brandino.com.au showcases diverse examples from the last ten years.

Ric concluded his talk by inviting fSpace members to reach out to him, to explore opportunities to collaborate. Working on a wide range of projects, he’s always looking to be inspired by – and learn from – good people.

Marie Wong was the latest to share what she does at a recent fSpace Talks event. Marie is a lawyer and trade mark attorney who specializes in intellectual property (IP) and works from fSpace one day a week. Marie is a Principal of Wrays, a specialist IP practice that provides advice and assistance in all areas of IP protection and branding strategy, with offices across Australia.

While Marie focuses on brand protection (incorporating trade marks, copyright, domain names, branding & e-commerce), she works closely with her other IP colleagues at Wrays who specialize in the filing and enforcement of registered designs and patents across scientific fields such as engineering, computing, chemistry and life sciences. The focus of Wrays and Marie’s practice as an IP lawyer is supporting creativity and innovation.

Marie described IP as the intangible property of the mind which gives rise to a tangible and valuable product or outcome for society.

Marie provided an overview of the different types of IP that all businesses – large or small – deal with every day. Marie provided an example of today’s smartphones, which are protected by: over 1000 patents, including for their semiconductors, batteries and screens; copyright protecting the artwork and software code; design rights to protect aesthetics; and, of course, trade marks – the brand names, logos and other distinctive signs (including shape marks) by which products such as the “iPhone” are differentiated.

Whilst copyright (protecting the expression of words, software code and artistic form) is an unregistered right, which is automatically granted, and has a ‘long life’ protection (typically 70 years after the death of the author), other rights – such as registered design and patent rights – need to be applied for (usually before any commercial use or disclosure) and last only 10 to 20 years from the date the design/patent was registered.

Trade marks, the area in which Marie works most, can be registered or unregistered and have a potentially unlimited lifespan. Marie works with a variety of clients from a range of different industries to identify and protect their core brands, and regularly assists clients with trade mark audits, searching and clearance (for proposed brand names, logos and taglines), and trade mark filing and enforcement, both locally and overseas. She also helps her clients prevent cybersquatting by watching and protecting new domain names and extensions, and filing complaints when necessary.

One client is another member from fSpace who is a graphic designer. Marie has worked with the designer and her client to ensure that a proposed new brand identity was available for registration as a domain name and trade mark, and to secure registered trade mark protection for the new brand name. Marie regularly works with creative agencies to identify legal issues in the use and roll-out of creative and marketing collateral, including websites and digital marketing.

Marie also noted her own experience with seeking registration of a trade mark for “Roaming Kitchen”, a side-project that Marie and fellow fSpace member, Kim-Vu Salamonsen, have been working on to promote a “unique pop-up kitchen, roaming
through different rooms, flavours and musical delights in sunny Perth,
Western Australia”, based in Fremantle. The trade mark encountered difficulties to registration because the name of the restaurant, Roaming Kitchen, was deemed to be a common term or descriptor and therefore ineligible for trademark protection. Marie described the process of preparing submissions and gathering evidence of use, in the role of the “client”, to try and get this trade mark across the line.

Thanks to Marie for giving us a glimpse into the world of IP and the protections that go with it. Anyone wanting advice on IP is welcome to contact Marie at marie.wong@wrays.com.au.

fSpace is pleased to announce that Jason Normandale has joined fSpace as Sales & Marketing Manager.

In addition to helping promote fSpace and attract new members, Jason will also be directly involved in our continuing efforts to enhance the fSpace atmosphere and experience as we strive to provide the best and most inspiring environment for our members to produce their best work.

Jason can be reached at jason@fspace.me or 0427 929 186 – welcome Jason!